I get “stuck” in my writing often, which is perhaps another way to say, I get afraid: of writing, of my own inquiries, of trusting how I sound and move in my body, in the practices that lend form to the poems, and in the poems themselves. Often my sense of being stuck is meeting an edge that transmits to me that I’m walled off from welcoming exchange from my environment, or in some position of refusal I don’t understand.
So I juggle. Juggling takes me far from myself at first, and then, soon enough, brings me miraculously back. It is excursion-like, an opportunity to “go see” what’s on the other side of where, or how, I am. I like to see my three red, velvet beanbags—or black walnuts! pine cones! lemons!—move in threes in front of me. They reflect back to me my own capacity for levity, movement, and circulation. When they’re there, before me, it feels like being able to see the continuity of my breathing. They just keep going and going. I catch myself smiling. I wonder if my writing slows to slow me down enough to see that delight. Juggling repairs some of the feedback loops—it’s my favorite trick.
—MaKshya Tolbert, author of Shade Is a Place (Penguin Books, 2025)